Cost Effectiveness of Data Flow Machines and Vector Processors

Proponents of data flow machines always emphasize the high potential for parallelization and the high performance on numerical applications reachable by that kind of architecture. On the other hand opponents critisize the additional overhead during run time and the difficulties of the memory management. In order to evaluate the cost effectiveness of dynamical data flow machines we compare a well known representative, the Monsoon designed at the MIT, with two vector processors, the Cray I and the Spark 2.0. This comparison is based on a theoretical model, which provides measures for the run time and the cost of the machines. As numerical workload we have chosen some kernels from the Livermore Loops benchmark. In this paper we briefly review the evaluation model, we describe the machines under consideration and finally we present our results of the comparison